The number of people in the Maimai resignation group is already more than the number of incumbents.
Xu Mengfan noticed that the size of his resignation group was growing, climbing from more than 100 people to more than 300 people, and this was just a group chat. Another former employee, Yang Quede, has a group of 407 people.
As a start-up employee of Maimai, Xu Mengfan felt embarrassed: "When I went, there were more than 20 people in the team, and the scale only developed little by little. At its peak, the number of employees once reached more than 1,000, which can be called a "middle factory". In the past two or three years, the scale has dropped to more than 300 people.
In Xu Mengfan's memories, Maimai once represented a free, vigorous and vigorous Internet spirit: "At that time, a group of colleagues around me were all cattle people who graduated from Qingbei and were born in large factories. We ate with Lin Fan (the founder) every day in the small restaurants around the company, and it was just a matter of three tables, and we went to pay for the finances after eating. At noon, we played football and cards together. ”
In the era when "wolf nature" and "volume" have not yet become popular, Pulse has groped to become the only new force in the domestic workplace social field, repelled LinkedIn's Chitu head-on, and won a number of financings.
But ten years later, this fast-growing fairy tale has dissipated, and it has gathered countless Internet workers in a specific era, and shattered the dreams it has described with its own hands under the cruel reality.
On December 15, 2023, Maimai, who started in the workplace community and is known as the "Dachang Pantry", became the protagonist of the gossip.
On this day, many Maimai employees suddenly found that their provident fund contribution ratio was reduced from 12% to 5% without their knowledge. Employees who felt disrespected immediately posted on Maimai until the topic was pushed to the top of the hot list on the site.
It's really dramatic, pushing the negativity of one's own company to the top of the hot search list of its own platform, which usually doesn't happen to Internet companies.
On this day, Lin Fanzheng, the founder and CEO of Maimai, appeared at the "MAX Annual Workplace Power Ceremony", one of the most important activities of the year. It can be called a key node for the 10th anniversary of the establishment of Maimai, and Lin Fan was specially arranged to give a speech and award ceremony.
But almost as soon as he turned around and walked off the stage of the MAX conference, Lin Fan was about to deal with an outbreak of public relations crisis.
At about 11 o'clock that night, he explained in an internal group chat: "The reason for not notifying in time is that it took 2 weeks to discuss the 'perfect' notification plan." Regarding the surging employee emotions, he still had helplessness in his words, saying that he had planned to notify the news, "but it was revealed in advance by the circle of colleagues."
This is not the first time that Maimai has been in the center: in 2022, Maimai will be on Weibo because of layoffs. But at that time, Maimai's own professional area was "quiet".
And this time, although Lin Fan tried to remedy it, many employees still found it difficult to accept, and the relevant discussions continued to ferment in the station. In addition to emotions such as anger, the "sense of gap" may be a more accurate description of the psychology of Maimai employees today.
After all, in 2021, Maimai also expanded its enrollment in a big way. Unexpectedly, in just two years, the situation changed abruptly.
Former employee Xu Min joined Maimai during the expansion period. According to his recollection, by March 2022, the total number of employees in the company was close to 800, almost double the number of employees before the expansion.
According to a number of employees, the reason for the rapid expansion is largely the eagerness to take on some of the new influx of traffic.
Xu Min said: "During the period from the second half of 2021 to the beginning of 2022, affected by the implementation of the double reduction policy, many employees of Internet education and training enterprises poured into Maimai. Whether it's complaining or looking for a job, the registration of Maimai users has risen very sharply all of a sudden. In addition, at that time, Kuaishou and other large factories broke out layoffs, and the discussion of related news also kept Maimai's daily activity at a high point.
Therefore, although Lin Fan said in an interview with "Late LatePost" in March 2021 that he would "keep a slow pace", half a year later, he chose to make a decisive move and wanted to seize this unexpected opportunity.
"The revenue at the beginning of 2022 was not much different from that in 2021, but it was different over time, and the company soon found that the revenue in 2022 was not as much as the same period in 2021." At that time, Lin Fan said internally that it was because of a black swan event. Xu Min said.
Pulse, which had just completed its expansion, entered the stage where it needed to lay off employees.
Nowadays, this is not surprising, with the peak of Internet traffic dividends, changes in the external environment and other trends, the growth of the entire Internet has generally been impacted. Afterwards, Xu Min also used "aggressiveness" and "good betting" to evaluate the decision to expand recruitment.
But he also admitted that when the traffic poured in, he also judged that Maimai was ushering in a new development opportunity, but failed to see the hidden crisis behind it.
This mode of thinking, which comes from the common life experience of a generation of Internet people, has also become the path dependence of Maimai.
In 2013, stepping on the prelude to the outbreak of the mobile Internet ecological market, Maimai was officially established, and it had a very high starting point from the beginning.
As a pioneer in the field of workplace social networking in China, Maimai's "gossip area" function, which focuses on anonymous social networking, quickly took shape, and eventually became its representative product in the future, the "Career Words" section. Functions such as chatting, real-name dynamics, real-name authentication, and topics have also gradually matured.
At the same time, the development of the domestic Internet business ecology is on the rise, and the influx of a large number of young users has allowed Maimai to gather valuable traffic and obtain the earliest advertising revenue.
Since August 2016, the Maimai membership system has been launched, providing paid rights and interests such as fast contact and unlimited search, which has been welcomed by many users because it can break the limit of "3 degrees of connection". Membership quickly became its second largest revenue**.
Maimai's ambitions don't stop there. In 2018, it again targeted the recruitment business.
Yang Quede told Shijie that it was at this time that he left his old club Lagou.com and joined the Maimai Recruitment Division: "At that time, the most essential advantage of Maimai was that it did have some high-quality talents on its platform that other platforms did not have. ”
He also revealed that during the same period, a group of colleagues from Lagouwang joined Maimai, and the facts proved that they made the right choice: "I remember that the company had more than 1,000 people at its peak, and most of them were recruited students. On August 9, 2021, the revenue of the recruitment business exceeded 100 million yuan, and the commemorative cola can is still on my desk. ”
In this way, Maimai has formed a three-pronged business structure of membership, advertising, and recruitment.
It can be said that since its establishment, Maimai has been making additions with the vigorous development of the Internet market, which may have become a kind of inertia.
At its peak, in the daily life of employees of large Internet companies, Maimai has a strong sense of existence: reading gossip, criticizing leaders together, or learning about new career opportunities can be completed in Maimai. However, while this made Maimai gain great activity, it was also criticized by Dachang, who was once called "the public enemy of Dachang".
When the environment changes, the pulse may not respond properly, but it is not completely unperceived.
Yang Quede told the city boundary a scene: listening to colleagues in South China, during the period of 2022Q1 (April to June), which was also the same period of the large-scale expansion of Maimai, Lin Fan once made an internal speech when he moved to Shenzhen Workplace, "At that time, he mentioned Ren Zhengfei's report that he wanted to pass on the chill to everyone, and also shared the prediction of some of his entrepreneur friends on the recruitment business, but the words are more optimistic about the future direction of Maimai, and it is also very exciting." ”
It was also around this speech that Maimai adjusted its business structure. According to Yang Quede, "In the past, different business divisions were independent of each other, and the advantage was that they were more flexible, but sometimes they would form a preemption of resources. After this time, it was proposed to pull through horizontally and integrate departments, with the goal of merging the advertising and recruitment divisions in 2022Q2, and changing the name to the **mai division. ”
Reality has proved that the impact of business pressure and environmental changes is ultimately greater than the effect of internal efficiency improvement. And it also pulls Maimai's cash flow into a dangerous situation.
In June 2022, Maimai started the first wave of layoffs, this time only handing over the layoff indicators to department leaders and HR. But soon Lin Fan himself began to come forward.
During this time, Lin Fan began to emphasize the concept of "net profit" within the company, that is, positive cash flow, income minus all expenses should be greater than zero.
Due to the natural dilemma of commercialization of community and social products, Maimai's revenue scale is relatively small, and Lin Fan is also secretive about this topic: in 2019, he said that the company was "close to profitability";Since then, he has said that Maimai has "made money in the last two months of 2020 and has not lost money". The side shows that Maimai has been struggling with profitability for many years after its establishment.
According to Xu Min's recollection, "In 2022, Lin Fan directly said internally that the main thing to make net profit is to control the expenditure part and control the salary of employees. In November of this year, Maimai laid off employees again.
Lack of money is no longer a secret inside the vein.
An employee told Shijie that in the early years, Maimai was known for providing "nine benefits" in the online job market. The latest situation is that in the past, the nine major benefits "only left were gyms and overtime taxis, and the company would also control the taxi budget and let HR count it every month".
Maimai's nine welfare puzzles in the past, photo source Courtesy of the interview guest).
In 2023, the pressure has not eased, and Maimai first expanded the proportion of low-performing employees in the annual performance evaluation in AprilIn August, the integration of business lines was carried out. Every time there is a change, a part of the staff leaves.
It can be said that the inaccuracy of the strategy in 2021 has brought a huge price to Maimai. However, another major reason why we are stuck in a tight cash flow situation cannot be ignored is that Maimai has been unfavorable in financing in recent years.
Counting the past, the pulse was once extremely full of "bullets".
In 2013, Lin Fan, who had a glamorous resume of "graduating from Tsinghua Computer Science Department + participating in the establishment of Sogou", started his own business, and gathered a group of outstanding talents such as Tsinghua Gang, Sogou and Dajie.com veterans (Lin Fan served as a technical partner in "Dajie.com" after leaving Sogou).
Tianyancha shows that as soon as the Starlight Glimmer team was established, it attracted $5 million in Series A financing from Wuyuan Capital, and completed a $20 million Series B round in 2014.
In 2017, Maimai became a unicorn after completing a $75 million Series C funding round. It was also in this year that Lin Fan publicly preached that Maimai planned to go public in 2019 with a "target market value of $10 billion".
After completing a $200 million Series D financing in 2018, Maimai not only failed to IPO, but also did not bring in new financing.
Yang Quede told the city that according to his understanding, in the past few years, a number of investors have contacted the pulse, but none of them have been finalized.
Facing the multiple difficulties of difficult to open financing channels, tight cash flow, and pressure on the external environment, Maimai urgently needs to break the situation.
It's not hard to understand that recruitment is seen as the most important way to break the game
According to official data, in 2020 and 2021, the revenue growth of Maimai's recruitment business will be %, leading the entire industry respectively. Although the growth rate will drop to 30% in 2022, this year Lin Fan told "Daily People" that the proportion of recruitment revenue has become 50%, and advertising and membership account for 25% each.
Allowing the pillar business to reproduce the high growth of the past has become the most eager thing for Maimai to do at present.
At the beginning of 2023, Lin Fan announced the establishment of a new business brand "Maimai Gaopin", aiming at the mid-to-high-end talent recruitment market, claiming that "the market share and operating income target within 3 years will surpass Liepin and become the largest brand in the Chinese market".
Maimai undoubtedly wants to catch up with the spring recruitment season of "Golden Three Silver Four", but it is not as easy as imagined to open the situation.
According to Yang Quede's recollection, starting from the second quarter of 2023, the customer renewal rate (recruitment business) has shown a sharp downward trend, and by Q4 2023, the renewal rate of some industries has dropped to the level when the recruitment business first started in 2018.
Why is it so difficult to break the recruitment situation in non-advantageous industries?
In this regard, Yang Quede shared his observations: "Recruitment should be divided into industries, the traditional Internet is an advantageous industry, and the customer renewal rate remains at a relatively high point. However, Maimai does not have any advantage in the supply of talents in non-advantageous industries, and the renewal rate has been at a low level, and there will be a relatively high contract interruption rate or customer churn rate. ”
In addition to the amount of talent accumulation, environmental issues, and the cliché top-level logical conflict between Maimai anonymous social networking and recruitment in large factories, in the eyes of industry insiders, there is still a lot of room for optimization in the experience of using Maimai products.
SOHO headhunter Wang Ling told Shijie: "Maimai recruits a bit like a headhunting agency in essence. However, whether it is a SOHO headhunter or a headhunting agency, it must be able to accurately understand and efficiently match the employment needs of customers. "The accuracy of polishing products requires long-term and continuous feedback and optimization in order to see the results and exchange for benefits. This is not so easy for the current cash-flow tight pulse.
Specifically, if you want to do a good job in recruitment, you need a step-by-step process: the recruitment service provider needs to attract some B-end enterprise users and C-end job seekers first, and do a good job of portrait analysis on the respective needs between the B and C-end, and then match them to promote transactions. This process is constantly circulating, and the ultimate pursuit is matching efficiency. Ideally, as the number of users grows larger, a double helix structure of user growth will form between the two ends of B and C, and "turn faster and faster".
However, Xu Min found that in the past Maimai's business process, portrait analysis and matching were "rough". In the case of low matching efficiency, in order to promote more delivery and generate revenue, the recruitment team can only rely on continuously increasing the number of matches: "It is to use the denominator to improve the numerator, eager to produce miracles." ”
This method is not efficient, and it brings a bad experience to B-end enterprises and C-end job seekers. "For example, C-end users will often receive pulse prompts 'XX company is interested in you', but when you click in, you will find that the position does not match at all. ”
As a veteran employee who has grown along with the recruitment business, Yang Quede also has a sense of this, and has given feedback on the problem many times.
He said: "The company has a special group for recruitment business feedback, and there is an operation student who is specifically responsible for customer voices, and regularly collects and sorts out customer complaints or product complaints for internal feedback, including the problem of mismatch in job recommendations, etc., and there are many problems that have not been solved after four or five years of feedback." There have been several special meetings organized by the commercial operation center and invited Lin Fan and regional leaders to participate. ”
I remember very well that at one meeting, Lin Fan had a definition, saying that we should solve high-priority problems, rather than medium- and long-term (to bring value) problems, and he said that these problems of customer feedback are constantly emerging and cannot be solved. ”
What is the highest priority for Maimai?
The emphasis on income, whether it is from the boss or the spirit conveyed from above, has always been to put the completion rate of income in the first place," Yang Quede further explained, "A certain demand is a business demand, or some needs that can be customized and delivered, to put it bluntly, these projects can really get money, so that they can coordinate resources from various departments of production, research and marketing." ”
This has almost become a vicious circle, due to the shortage of funds, Maimai is desperate to chase short-term revenue, and does not have much power to make medium and long-term investment. And the poor product experience brings a lot of trouble to customers and users.
Breaking this cycle requires a lot of painful thinking and choices. This is also a problem that many companies have faced or are facing.
At the MAX conference in 2023, Lin Fan said that when the economy changes, both large and small companies can survive, but many medium-sized companies will not be able to persevere. He went on to add: "Medium-sized companies are defined as those with 500-1,000 people."
According to this standard, the first has now reached the size of more than 300 people, and it has entered a certain degree of safety zone. Nevertheless, in the face of the rampant controversy and the constant internal and external shocks, can it finally truly "pass through the cycle"?
Lin Fan once said that he is good at product technology and not good at making decisions.
But there are many big choices, no one can do it for Lin Fan, only he can do it himself. Finally, Xu Min said to the city boundary.
Xu Mengfan, Yang Quede, Xu Min, and Wang Ling are pseudonyms in the article).
Author |Dong Wenshu.
Edit |Dong Yuqing.
Operations |Liu Shan.